edna st vincent millay. her life edna st. vincent millay (1892-1950) was well known in her day as a...
TRANSCRIPT
HER LIFE
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
was well known in her day as a master
of the sonnet. Many of her works
showed great lyrical style in the
traditional Shakespearean sonnet form.
A SHADY PAST
Edna St Vincent Millay was born on February 22, 1892
and had two sisters.
In 1904 Millay’s mother officially divorced her father for
financial irresponsibility, but they had been separated for
some years prior.
Millay had relationships with many people.
THE SONNET FORM
Two stanzas: the first being an octave with two quatrains;
the second, a sestet composed of a quatrain and a couplet.
The traditional themes of a sonnet usually revolve around
the tormented lover .
Ms. Millay perfected this "tormented lover" role in her
sonnets.
PITY ME NOT - BACKGROUND
"Pity Me Not" was written in 1923, a period
characterised by poets consistently examining their
psyches.
Edna St. Vincent Millay continued this study of her
"worthlessness" throughout most of this time.
Before 1923, she indeed lived through an amount of
pain and sadness.
1923
Was the year St Vincent Millay married a rather wealthy man,
finally finding love while freeing herself from financial
responsibilities, allowing her to devote all of her time to her art.
It was the year she first became published in Europe, to a
resounding success. It was also the year she won the Pulitzer Prize
for poetry--only the second of its kind awarded .
So it’s kind of weird that she presents such a
negative view on love in Sonnet 29, given her
situation. Or is it?
PITY ME NOT
In "Pity Me Not," Millay uses the cyclical forces of
nature as a metaphor for her version of the cycle of
love, a version that concludes a man’s love for a
woman always ends.
Her comparison, however, becomes paradoxical as
she moves from the rational mind to the emotional
heart.
THE F IRST STANZA
Rational comparisons of nature to love.
The first two lines refer to sunset and one is reminded of the
warmth love brings to life. A warmth that naturally fades as love
dies.
Next, she moves to beauty and the aging process.
Unfortunately as women get older, American society often
considers their beauty lost just as flowers wither as winter
approaches.
FURTHERMORE…
Millay seems to assume that men cannot love if the
woman has no beauty left. "The waning of the moon" can
easily refer to the loss of romance and passion, since
moonlight is often considered a sensuous setting.
Finally, "the ebbing of the tide" washes away any
remnants of the romance. Passion’s tide will only go lower
and lower from this point.
THEN THE METAPHOR BECOMES CLEAR…
Millay finishes the octave directly tying love to nature. Up
to this point, love has not been explicitly addressed.
"Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon, and you no longer look on love with me."
SO WHAT SHE’S SAYING IS…
Millay looks at the passing of love, the end of men’s desire, as
a natural part of life. She seems resigned to it.
She accepts it and declares, "Pity me not" the loss of these
precious things, for there is nothing else which could happen.
With the tone of the octave, she clearly does not sound so
much as a "tormented lover" as she does someone who has
become completely jaded to love altogether. The torment is long
finished.
In line 9, she tells us directly that she indeed has gone through these stages of love enough to become resigned to the inevitable:
"This I have known always: love is no more"
A SH IFT IN TONE
It is with line 10 that the tone of the poem twists to something
totally conflicting with the octave.
Lines 10-12 all compare the ending of love to natural events that
are clearly not cyclical or expected at all. Passages such as "the
wide blossom which the wind assails" or "the great tide that
treads the shifting shore strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the
gales" reveal that she is not at all calm over the ending of love.
The imagery throughout this section is violent.
It is as if she is the wide blossom assailed; that the shifting shore is her foundation, her emotions being eroded; that the wind is now no longer a natural, common wind but a gale!
Probably the most effective word that demonstrates these bad feelings is "wreckage."
The term is the only man-made noun in the entire poem, a term that is not natural at all. The vision of boats being mangled and ripped in a storm quickly comes to mind. She clearly seems to see herself as the "fresh wreckage" in the midst of a grand emotional storm.
SO WE HAVE TO ASK…
If the ending of love is rational and
expected, why have this outburst of
torture and torment?
THE COUPLET!
As typical in so many sonnets, the couplet ends with a surprise and a
tying together of all the elements of the poem above it.
In the octave Millay asks her readers not to pity her the ending of love,
as it is simply a natural occurrence in her spoiled view. In the couplet she
gets to the point of her real pain.
“Pity me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn."
WHAT DOES SHE WANT THEN?!
She is asking for sympathy.
She knows that love will end. She watches it happen time and time again
around her, but she laments that she still feels pain in her heart.
She feels she is smarter than that but still she succumbs to her emotions.
The octave is a representation of her mind, her rationalising assumption that
relationships cannot naturally work. The sestet’s quatrain represents the pain,
the emotional violence that still emerges despite all of her rationalisations.
PARADOX
The ending of love is not
cyclically expected as is the
sunset or the waning of the moon
-- at least not in her heart where
it matters the most.